Evolution of Style

I remember back in art college when I was struggling, not unlike any art student, to develop my work and define myself as an artist. As I was pouring over a Communication Arts Magazine, I saw an ad for a newly published book called The Push Pin Style. It looked good so I sent away for it. Good sources were hard to come by. This was pre-internet and on top of that, there just wasn’t the enormous access to design and illustration work or theory out there. For those unfamiliar with Push Pin Studios, it was a collective of illustrators and designers that were on the vanguard of middle to later 20th Century American visual communication. I loved the work they did and became interested in exploring the varied styles and media that they used. These pre-computer images were generated by hand using various media techniques. Push Pins’s work inspired me and developing my ability was something I wanted to pursue. As with any technique, each of the mediums used would give results unique to it’s nature. Each process has it’s inherent challenges but each offers unique solutions and working in different disciplines was something that I have pursued though out my career.

The break though of digital technology has made it an exciting time to be involved in visual arts and I embrace it as another option. Commercially, in the fast pace industry of Illustration, Design, Video Production and Gaming there is the need to serve market demand and the computer performs this excellently. In many cases, commercial work being done is forging a new frontier and one that I want to be a part of. It’s not the only option, however, it’s interesting to mix it up. Its fun to get away from the monitor and work in other ways. Its been said that creativity comes from play and there’s something playful about working with different materials.

For the artists there has always been an age old struggle to balance Art and Commence-what you have to do to make a living and what you want to do as an artist. Some in the profession don’t have this struggle. Those that don’t, see it only as an enterprise and a way of financial gain. For them it works well and the work produced is generally polished, well executed and serves its intended purpose. However, the majority of work being done that just brings in income doesn’t move the form forward. This way of thinking becomes problematic especially, when this ideology seeps into the education system. Sure it should be market driven and about commerce, but when the educational system starts to shift away from drawing, individual expression and conceptual problem solving and becomes all about technology it’s a big problem. When the emphasis toward young people entering college is only to learn how to use software I see it as a concern. No longer then is self expression, personal point of view and the value of critical thinking emphasized, and as we all know, ideas are valuable.

This gets me back to why I still think the work of the Push Pin model is valid. I think the important quest as a creative individual is to explore self expression and personal point of view. This is easier in Fine Art than in Graphic Design. But both are driven by idea. It make no difference how it was done as long as the final solution serves it’s intended purpose. The notion that anything not done by computer is out dated, and that the word traditional is used as a dismissive term meaning not relevant, is ridiculous. Work done non-digitally in many cases, in my opinion is much harder to excel in and challenges the mind in unique ways. I love trying to work in many mediums because its an expeditionary process. Creative breakthroughs come when the mind is at play. It’s irrational to discount or ignore completely the processes that have been used by those before us  and the work that was created by them. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants and we got here by how they thought, their creative process, and what they accomplished. There is great value in that.

One thing that Neil Postman (American author, media theorist and cultural critic), said has always stayed with me and goes something like this: “With every new technology introduced, something is lost. We are still at point where we are trying to understand what it is that is being lost”.